Streep's movies lately seem to be less about acting than about career. As she has explained, she is a 45-year-old star struggling to maintain the Big Mo in an industry that 1) pays larger salaries to male stars and 2) is increasingly dependent on internationally marketable action blockbusters. Streep's predicament doesn't quite wring the heart—my mind keeps leaping to an image of the Little Prince alone on his tiny planet—but she is Meryl Streep, and she has been a rare force of passion and intelligence in movies. She shouldn't end up like Bette Davis, playing a spittle-mouthed old bat in Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte.
So now Streep is the star of this competently made thriller about a history teacher, her estranged husband (Strathairn) and their son (Joe Mazzello), whose Whitewater rafting trip is shanghaied by a murderous thief (Bacon). For the movie, shot on the rapids of Montana's Kootenai River, Streep did most of her own rowing, which is more significant than her deftly deployed range of nuances (including a remarkable laugh that, in one crucial scene, slides from mockery into despair). The real star of the movie, after all, is the terrible churning rapids that Streep and crew will face as they speed downriver.
How unfortunate, then, that Nature cannot be taught to act. Despite stereophonic sound that makes every surge of the river smack against the ears like a tsunami, the much-awaited climax isn't all that gripping. It looks like superior footage from a fishing segment on ABC's Wide World of Sports. Could it be that we have been spoiled by big, whoop-de-do thrillers like True Lies, with their exploding bridges and minor nuclear explosions? At any rate, one of the high points here is when the family dog, a yellow lab, jumps into the water. Sploosh!
Streep's next project is the coveted role of the lovelorn farm wife who falls in love with a National Geographic photographer played by Clint Eastwood in The Bridges of Madison County. That sounds like the sort of intensely romantic part she does best. (PG-13)
Audrey Hepburn, Rex Harrison
Miss Hepburn, all is forgiven. Thirty years ago, especially if one was young and a really big fan of Mary Poppins, it seemed a great injustice when Hepburn was handed the plum part of Eliza Doolittle in the My Fair Lady movie instead of Julie Andrews, who in 1956 had created the role on Broadway. Well, the big surprise in seeing this painstakingly restored version (the deteriorating original negative has been patched and polished and the sound enhanced) of the 1964 film is the genuine feeling and comic flair, not to mention the sheer loveliness, that Hepburn brings to the role of the cockney flower girl turned lady. She's glorious, particularly in the movie's later scenes, even if it is Marni Nixon's voice coming out of her mouth during the musical numbers—with the exception of "Just You Wait, Henry Higgins," which Hepburn sang-spoke. (The restored video edition, due in stores Oct. 14, also includes Hepburn's own vocals on "Wouldn't It Be Loverly")
Johnny Depp, Martin Landau, Sarah Jessica Parker, Patricia Arquette
Director Tim Burton, whose career is based on a morbid yet sentimental affection for the world's grotesqueries and misfits, has found an ideal subject in Ed Wood (1924-1978). A grade-Z horror director, Wood was also a transvestite, fond of dressing in angora sweaters and wearing pumps both behind the camera and (in the case of his 1953 ode to drag, Glen or Glenda?) before it. Wood's career, which had never ventured more than an inch or so beyond the lint pile of obscurity, was resurrected (sort of) in 1980, when his 1959 fiasco Plan 9 from Outer Space was saluted as all-time worst movie in Michael and Harry Medved's book The Golden Turkey Awards. Plan 9 is, indeed, a remarkably inept flying-saucer movie. It stars Swedish wrestler Tor Johnson; TV horror hostess Vampira; an aged, dissipated Bela Lugosi; and—because Lugosi died after filming only one scene—a Lugosi stand-in, Wood's chiropractor, Tom Mason, who stalked about the film's main set, a cemetery of cardboard tombstones, with a black cape draped across his face.
Does this really sound any worse than Natural Born Killers?
But I digress. Ed Wood is a sweet, self-contained piece of work that aspires to nothing more than a cheesy integrity worthy of the master. To that end, it succeeds. It's nicely shot in black and white and blessed with a near-perfect cast. Actually, Landau, as Dracula star Lugosi, is perfection. The physical resemblance is astonishing, and the hollow-eyed anguish of his morphine addiction is the movie's one bit of genuine emotional depth. Bill Murray is typically giddy as would-be transsexual Bunny Breckinridge. Parker and Arquette, as Wood's flames, both have an intriguingly oblique quality.
The only misfire, alas, is Depp, who was so haunting in Burton's Edward Scissorhands. Here, he tends to throw his head back and deliver his lines with an ironic, eager-beaver snap. He seems to be doing a Jon Lovitz impersonation. (R)
Charlie Sheen, Nastassja Kinski
You could suspend your disbelief from here to Samoa and this lame film still wouldn't make much sense. Sheen, who was a hit in Hot Shots! and The Three Musketeers and a flop in Navy SEALS, is much better at spoofing action heroes than he is at being one. In this case, as a former Olympic gymnast now a skydiving instructor outside Phoenix, he spends most of his time frowning, swaggering and trying to look tough.
Then there's Kinski, who is supposed to be a former KGB agent mixed up in a plot by the Russian mafia to steal a 747 full of Russian government gold and hide it—where else?—in Arizona. Kinski's accent is thick enough for her to pass for Russian, but she looks less than comfortable in her secret agent mode. As for the Sheen-Kinski romance, there would likely be more chemistry between Martin and Klaus than there is between their offspring. (PG-13)
- Contributors:
- Tom Gliatto,
- Leah Rozen,
- Ralph Novak.
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
